On Monday, Denmark became the second European country to officially close its investigation into the explosion of the Nord Stream gas pipeline.
In September 2022 a series of explosions disabled both branches of the Nord Stream pipeline between Russia and Germany. Completed in 2012, for almost a decade the pipeline provided Russian natural gas to Western Europe. Although the United States expressed unease over the act of cooperation between Russia and its European allies, the Nord Stream played a crucial role in fueling German industry and providing low-cost energy throughout the continent.
Observers immediately blamed the United States for the act of industrial sabotage, pointing to US President Joe Biden’s cryptic promise to “bring an end” to the project if Russia moved to intervene in Ukraine’s attacks on the ethnically Russian Donbass region. Denmark’s inquiry indeed found the explosions were an act of “deliberate sabotage,” although Danish officials refused to investigate who bore responsibility.
Investigative journalist Dan Lazare joined Sputnik’s The Critical Hour program on Wednesday to comment on the US ally’s report.
“It's just absolutely farcical,” said the iconoclastic author. “I don't know how much longer this can go on. I mean, Denmark investigated, came up with a conclusion, and everybody knows it was obviously sabotage – that was obvious from the very start. And [Denmark] refrains from pointing a finger at a likely culprit.”
“And the reason, of course, is the likeliest culprit – in fact, I'm 100% convinced that it is the culprit – is the United States,” he claimed. “But, Denmark, Sweden, everybody is afraid to say it. It's extraordinary.”
“The man or woman on the street knows perfectly well who did this, but the liberal centrist parties try to bottle it up, try to deny reality,” he explained. “Which means that the only parties talking about it [are] other parties, the populist parties on the far-right, like the Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) in Germany. And the AfD actually is riding this issue rather hard.”
“So if the AfD is climbing in the polls they have Joe Biden to thank because Joe Biden blew the pipeline up, and everyone's afraid to admit it,” Lazare concluded.
The Alternative for Deutschland is one of a number of rightwing forces currently enjoying increased support in the West amidst economic hardship and the political establishment’s increasingly unpopular support for Ukraine’s proxy war against Russia. Lazare lists a number of figures benefitting from the phenomenon, including Donald Trump in the US, Marine Le Pen in France, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, and Giorgia Meloni in Italy.
“The center is self-destructing and virtually now ushering in the far-right to take its place,” he said, claiming establishment lawmakers “are going to pay a terrible, terrible price for covering this [Nord Stream sabotage] up.”
But Lazare insisted that liberal political parties are not the only institutions likely to be damaged by the explosive reality of the Nord Stream disaster.
“The US engaged in an act of war against a fellow NATO member,” he claimed bluntly. “NATO members aren't supposed to engage in war against one another. They're supposed to guard against attacks by outsiders.”
Lazare claimed “the political consequences would have been earth-shaking” if leaders publicly acknowledged the United States’ responsibility for the Nord Stream sabotage.
“Once people admit what happened, NATO essentially goes up in air because an alliance is not a scheme for one member to attack another,” he claimed. “It's a mutual defense pact, and the US violated it in spades. This Nord Stream [sabotage] is an event that will resonate for decades. It is an explosion of the heart of the Western alliance – it will completely destroy the Western alliance. There is no way that NATO can survive this blow once it becomes too big to ignore.”
NATO has already suffered various strains as the alliance has expanded into Eastern Europe, most recently with Turkiye and Hungary delaying Sweden’s accession to the bloc. Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico has also questioned the alliance’s direction in the past week, criticizing French President Emmanuel Macron’s suggestion that European troops should be sent to aid Ukraine in the Donbass.
But NATO has always been dominated by the United States, a reality demonstrated by the fact that every Supreme Allied Commander of the bloc has been American. Nationalist French President Charles de Gaulle recognized as much when he famously refused to place French troops under the alliance’s command.
European leaders have historically been content to tolerate the arrangement in exchange for promised military protection from America. But the United States may have finally taken things too far with its dramatic commandeering of the continent’s energy policy as well. Time will tell if Europe produces leaders finally willing to declare their countries’ independence.